The believer

Christine Welcher has followed politics for a long time, but for the first time ever the organic farmer in Walworth County has decided to enter the game. Running as a Democrat for the state assembly seat in the heavily Republican 32nd District, Welcher knows she’ll have an uphill battle in November.

That’s especially true in this election year, with its promise to bury every record in the state and nationwide: for campaign spending — visible and concealed; for naked and bitter partisanship, especially as Republican leaders in the state Capitol repeatedly wield power to their advantage; and for outright chaos within the two dominant political parties (think Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump vs. everyone else).

But as the earnest and enthusiastic 38-year-old Welcher heads into the political whirlwind, she’s also something of a self-selected guinea pig. Along with several other political hopefuls this year around Wisconsin, she is trying out some ideas from campaign-watchdog-turned-political-gadfly Mike McCabe and the movement he started less than a year ago called “Blue Jean Nation” — a diverse mix of longtime activists and those who have been “on the sidelines,” as Welcher describes herself.

Assembly candidate Christine Welcher, right, talks to Mary Martin in Stoughton. Although outside her Walworth County district, Welcher is seeking allies around the state to prove human connections can beat money in politics.

Hearing McCabe speak at a Unitarian church in Elkhorn last year helped inspire Welcher to run. “We need people representing people,” she says. “We need to get back to that basic level of a representative democracy.”

The goal, for McCabe, Blue Jean Nation, and those who have been drawn to the project across the Badger State, is to fundamentally reform how politics is played in Wisconsin, and eventually nationwide. While partly rooted in the work McCabe did for nearly two decades as a leading voice for campaign finance reform, it also represents a new direction for him.

McCabe doesn’t want to create a new party to rival Republicans and Democrats — something he believes would be doomed to failure. Instead, the onetime executive director of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign has a far more daunting vision: a bottom-up renovation of the political culture. He wants to see nothing less than the machinery of politics stripped down, retooled and reassembled — converted from a convoy of road-hogging stretch limousines carrying society’s most economically and politically advantaged into a fleet of shiny bicycles everyone can ride.

“It’s an attempt to pull people together to promote grassroots political change,” McCabe says. “If there’s an ideology behind Blue Jean Nation, it’s that we have to do everything in our power to fight political and economic privilege.”

The battle, McCabe says, isn’t so much between left and right, Republican and Democrat, as it is between the wealthy and everyone else. The “commoners,” as he calls them, make up the vast majority of the population and are the people he sees as shut out of the political system and rendered “politically homeless.”

“It hasn’t always been like this,” McCabe says. “Today’s conditions are an aberration for Wisconsin.”

It could be easy to dismiss McCabe as one more hopelessly naïve idealist, all the more so in today’s cynical and money-choked political climate. Yet for the activists and newcomers alike who have gravitated to the cause, the time has never been more ripe or urgent. And for some, the surprising popularity of Bernie Sanders’ insurgent, populist presidential campaign shows the movement’s broader potential.

Keith Schmitz, a longtime activist with Grassroots Northshore — a political network mobilizing progressives on Milwaukee’s north side and in its northern suburbs — believes Blue Jean Nation can fill a void. What’s needed, he says, is to strengthen links among like-minded groups around the state.

In a contest between well-funded conservative politicians and a progressive agenda that can tap the energies of enthusiastic and committed volunteers, “our time could beat their money,” says Schmitz. “But it’s just a matter of getting all this coordinated. That’s really what Mike is working on.”

Historian Nancy Unger, biographer of “Fighting Bob” La Follette and Belle Case La Follette, sees McCabe as one of a long line of heirs to their tradition.

The Blue Jean Nation platform is strikingly similar to the principles that bound much of the Progressive movement together, Unger observes (although “Net neutrality” would not have even been in the vocabulary of that era). In particular, the goal of engaging ordinary people more deeply in the work of politics reflects La Follette’s own philosophy that “mere passive citizenship is not enough,” says the professor at Santa Clara University in California.

“I do believe that the Progressives of Bob La Follette’s generation made real, substantial and lasting improvements,” Unger says. “La Follette stands as a pretty good indication that things like Blue Jean Nation are not a waste of time.”

A year ago, McCabe was the face of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Founded in 1995, the Democracy Campaign works for more public financing of political campaigns and stricter limits on campaign spending. But it also collects and analyzes data on money raised and spent by candidates and outside organizations in Wisconsin races — linking who contributes to campaigns to who benefits from legislation. Although widely viewed as left-leaning, the Democracy Campaign has asserted its political neutrality, drawing attention to Democrats and their funders, not just the GOP.

McCabe, a staffer with the Democracy Campaign since its founding, took over as director in 1999. A UW-Madison journalism graduate who briefly reported for a news service that covered Dane County, he churned out crisp, punchy reports that made the Democracy Campaign the go-to source for journalists tracking political spending in the state.

The group also worked alongside Wisconsin’s chapter of Common Cause in failed attempts to rein in phony issue ads that promote or (more often) trash candidates while dodging rules that are supposed to let voters see who’s paying to elect or defeat their lawmakers.

Wisconsin Common Cause director Jay Heck and McCabe “certainly had different ideas of what needed to be done or how it should be done,” says Heck. “I always thought that you needed to find areas of agreement between the parties” in developing and shepherding through reform laws, and that the path to change “was not an all-or-nothing proposition,” he recalls. “Mike was more of that school of thought that if it wasn’t [all-or-nothing], reforms wouldn’t have a chance to reform again.”

McCabe found working at the Democracy Campaign energizing — until it became enervating. As his 20-year anniversary at the organization loomed, it began to seem as though when the watchdog barked, people simply shut the window, rolled over and went back to sleep.

“I felt like people were growing numb to the influence of money in politics,” says McCabe. “Shining a light on it didn’t have the same impact in 2014 that it did in 2004, or in 1995 or ’96” — even when it was exposing “the very same kind of behavior — or even worse behavior — in 2012 or 2014.”

Lawmakers were no help. “No matter how skillful you were at taking the reform agenda up the steps of the Capitol, if there was nobody inside the building willing to meet you at the door and take that agenda in and really fight for it, we were still blocked. I really felt like I needed to try some new things.”

So McCabe retired. New thing No. 1 was a book, Blue Jeans in High Places — part diagnosis of a political system he pronounced “old and sickly,” and part prescription for recovery. The book is a spirited critique of the politics and economics of the last quarter century, leavened by a pointed cultural analysis that spares neither Democrats nor Republicans.

He begins with a brief memoir of growing up in Clark County, where his parents were able to buy and run their own dairy farm after more than two decades of tenant farming. From there, McCabe traces how Democrats have all but lost many rural voters.

The Democratic Party has a fundamentally tarnished brand, he contends, especially in rural areas where Democrats once held their own politically. Republican-engineered legislative gerrymandering and skillful dominance of the political discourse get their share of the blame. But McCabe also criticizes what he sees as an ineffectual Democratic response to problems festering in rural America.

McCabe takes pains to state he’s not opposed to public employee unions. But as private-sector unions declined while public-sector unions remained for a time strong, the Democrats’ fundamental identity as the party of the poor and the working class faded.

“Non-union workers like farmers who were being driven from their land and factory workers who were being downsized and outsourced and offshored to death started to feel growing resentment toward better-off unionized government employees who held on to pension plans, employer-paid insurance and other benefits that were long gone in the private sector,” he writes. And Republicans capitalized on their envy.

In the 2012 recall election, Gov. Scott Walker swept Clark County by more than 30 points — even though the governor “has done next to nothing to visibly benefit the area.” Why? McCabe writes that Democrats “may say we’re all in this together and need to look out for each other, but people in places like rural Clark County don’t see Democrats practicing what they preach.”

Further muddying the Democrats’ image and priorities was the national party’s growing dependence on industry donors, especially in banking and finance. Along with the loosening of campaign finance laws, that’s helped the richest slice of the population gain an outsized influence in the halls of Congress and state legislatures, he argues.

Democrats haven’t found a clear and forceful voice to counter Republican narratives. “We have one party that’s scary and one party that’s scared,” McCabe likes to say. Yet, he argues, a broad political coalition is waiting to be built around the idea of a “one for all” economy that shuns corporate welfare; tax reforms that eliminate loopholes for the wealthy; and a political environment where “common sense matters more than ideological purity.”

The book makes the case for the sort of major campaign finance reform that he spent a decade and a half pursuing at the Democracy Campaign, but McCabe doesn’t stop there. Instead, he urges people to engage politically in their community in ways that, he suggests, can possibly make an end run around political plutocracy.

“We’ve lost the capacity to organize locally with people that we really know,” he says, “and to reach out to people who we know but who may not agree with us, and then find common ground with them. That’s true citizenship.”

McCabe sees the book as “a sort of a cookbook, offering some recipes about how to make change at a time when wealth and privilege and money are such dominant forces in American politics,” he says. Readers were enthusiastic — but wanted some cooking lessons to go with it.

That led to New Thing No. 2. Readers around the state invited him to speak about the book, and some who thought about running for office sought his counsel. Thus Blue Jean Nation began. McCabe had T-shirts and yard signs printed up; one county Democratic Party group took some of the signs to the state Democratic convention in June 2015.

Holding forth one summer evening before a group of about 35 people in Racine, McCabe focused heavily on the state’s political divide. “How many of you would be comfortable describing yourself as members of the left?” he asked. Nearly all the hands in the room — most of them belonging to women and men north of 60 years old — went up.

“Your values can’t become public policy under the current environment,” he warned them. “You desperately need people like the ones in Clark County.”

What followed wasn’t an appeal to centrism, though. And he didn’t dismiss the remarkable success of the left’s cultural agenda — accomplishments like marriage equality.

What he emphasized, instead, was the need to shed ideological and party labels and to engage with neighbors and friends, regardless of their political stances, on genuine issues in which they are likely to find common ground. Such ground is especially fertile, he suggested, when it is focused on people’s economic struggles, on the way the economy favors the wealthiest and most advantaged, and on issues such as the state’s continued encroachment on the powers of local towns, villages and school districts.

After a series of such gatherings across the state, in the fall the group rolled out workshops in “Shoestring Politics” to give activists and would-be candidates tips on how to win without the money that everyone assumes is the key to victory. Sessions have taken place or are scheduled near Madison, around Eau Claire, in Menomonie and around Appleton, McCabe says. The events aren’t solo efforts — panel discussions are a standard part of the format, but for McCabe, there’s one central message: citizens need to reacquire some long-forgotten habits.

“People have been brainwashed over the course of decades and they have largely come to believe that there is only one political currency that’s relevant — that is money,” he says. “We’ve been trained to think that politics is the domain of professionals, that if you are going to be successful in politics you have to have a bunch of paid consultants, and that citizens don’t really have a place in politics anymore except writing checks. The muscles of citizenship have atrophied. One thing we need to think about doing is restrengthening those muscles.”

In place of money, McCabe suggests two other forms of “political currency.” One is deeper engagement among ordinary voters and citizens over politics and policy.

The other coin, he says, is “provocative ideas.” McCabe tells of a losing candidate who told him she was instructed to “be present and pleasant” on the campaign trail and went on to lose the race. Countless other failed office seekers have told him similar stories, he says, of political consultants who admonished them to raise money and avoid controversy. “It’s been the path to one defeat after another.”

Christine Welcher isn’t the only candidate who is looking at McCabe’s ideas for a campaign playbook. In the 42nd Assembly District, which takes in the eastern two-thirds of Columbia County along with portions of Dodge County and surrounding areas, George Ferriter is making his second run for a seat that two years ago was handily won by the Republican incumbent, Keith Ripp.

In that race, Ferriter counted some 10,000 visits with voters. In 2016, “We are going to extend that more aggressively,” he says, noting that will be his primary means of getting the word out. “We will run, not a campaign that’s going to rely on a bunch of money being spent on a succession of direct mailers to people, but will be a voter contact effort.”

It’s a serious effort, he says, but also one with a fairly steep uphill climb. On plenty of visits with voters, he says, the discussions over issues went very well — until he was asked what party he was representing.

“I would say ‘Democrat,’ and that was it,” he recalls; sometimes he’d hear something like, “Gee, I’m sorry I can’t vote for you.” Ferriter adds: “The well that a Democratic candidate might be able to draw from in rural Wisconsin has been pretty deeply poisoned.”

In Janesville, Tom Breu is mounting what might seem to be an even tougher battle — seeking the Democratic nomination to run against local congressman and House Speaker Paul Ryan. He’s focusing his campaign on income inequality, and he’s not shying from attention-getting devices; he campaigns in a refurbished hearse and put graphics on his campaign literature that play on his first name and last initial: “TomB.” “This is not a time to kind of smooth it out and don’t be controversial,” he says.

McCabe has drawn the interest of at least one person from the other half of the political spectrum. Mark Grams, a Marine veteran and former county veterans affairs official who lives in Two Rivers, says he leans Libertarian and is considering a run for office, though he’s not sure when. If he does, “I would more than likely run as a Republican,” Grams says.

Yet he, too, says he feels “politically homeless” and that the state needs a strong two-party system. He admires “Fighting Bob” La Follette as a Republican corruption fighter, and longtime Democratic U.S. Sen. William Proxmire, who famously spent only $145 on his last campaign for office in 1982.

“I’d like to be the person that when a bill is introduced gets somebody from both sides in my office” and hears their respective views. “Right now it doesn’t matter,” he says. Lawmakers “are going to vote the way the leadership tells them because of the money flow.”

Where will it all lead? Even McCabe says he isn’t sure. Topping his to-do list for now is a day-long “Blue Jean Nation Revival” in Neenah Feb. 20. “It’s not going to be a conventional political convention,” he says. “It’s going to have the feel of a town hall meeting.”

In the meantime, Blue Jean Nation is aligning itself as well with other groups — Wisconsin United to Amend, which seeks to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that removed restrictions on corporate campaign donations, and Grassroots Wisconsin. The goal, he says, is to work together without duplicating efforts or working at cross-purposes.

McCabe draws a sharp distinction between his vision for Blue Jean Nation and seemingly similar movements such as Move On. “What I hope it never becomes is another advocacy organization,” he says. “Most advocacy organizations operate on the model of professionalized politics. They treat citizens like nothing more than ATMs. I want Blue Jean Nation to empower local grassroots groups and local citizens. I don’t want them to empower Blue Jean Nation.”

For his own group, McCabe is raising money, but in a low-key way. People can donate on the website or help fund it by buying his book or a T-shirt.

Perhaps following his own advice for promoting provocative ideas, McCabe says that if Blue Jean Nation could accomplish just one thing, “the thing I would choose would be to play a meaningful role in the destruction of the political consulting industry.”

Thad Nation, a Milwaukee-based political consultant who worked closely with former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, says McCabe’s claims against his profession amount to “a gross oversimplification.”